Huawei has been taking some steps lately to develop smartphone hardware that is capable of attracting some attention, hoping to move past its reputation in the West as an OEM manufacturer of carrier-branded gear. This year, we’ve seen the company announce phones that impress with both their remarkable thinness and sheer number-crunching power. Regarding the latter, Huawei has announced its quad-core Ascend D, powered by a custom Huawei processor. The company has been talking about how this chip will make the Ascend D Quad the fastest phone around. Those are some bold claims, and now there’s already evidence starting to arrive that suggests the phone won’t live up to expectations.

Earlier benchmarks showed a strong performance from the Huawei phone, but as more hardware arrives to which it can be compared against, it’s becoming clear that Huawei’s competitors are edging slightly ahead.

Benchmark results at Rightware’s PowerBoard detail the performance of the Pantech Vega LTE, a handset powered by one of the other new powerhouse chips we’ve been talking about, the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4. Even as only a dual-core component, the S4 in the Pantech lets the phone outperform the Huawei and its quad-core chip. It seemed unlikely that the Huawei’s claim would stand for long, but to see it defeated by a dual-core chip like this, and before it’s even commercially available, is an especially bad start for the manufacturer.